Turkish Linguists against the West: The Origins of Linguistic Nationalism in Atatürk's Turkey

Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 40, No. 6, Nov. 2004. — pp. 1-25.Айтюрк Илькер. Турецкие лингвисты против Запада: Корни языкового национализма в кемалистской Турции (на англ. яз.)In the transformation from the defunct Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey, the official imperial language, Ottoman Turkish, represented an undesired past in the eyes of the Turkish nationalists. Just as the Ottoman Empire was an assembly of many ethnic groups, Ottoman Turkish was a conglomeration of Turkish, Arabic and Persian with some Italian, Greek, Armenian and other European elements, and was written using Arabic characters. Ottoman Turkish was not, therefore, palatable for the westernizing, nationalist elite, who wanted to create a nation-state for the Turks and to burn the bridges connecting the nascent republic to its Islamic, oriental predecessor. As part of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's reform movement, first, the alphabet was romanized in 1928. The establishment of the Turkish Language Institute (Turk Dil Kurumu) followed in 1932. The task of the institute was, among other things, to "purify" the language by ridding it of its non-Turkish components and to coin new, "authentic" words to replace them.